Formal Feelings

After great pain, it’s like daylight savings time, sudden, squint worthy, tired-eyed. If bugs had mammal brains, they would feel formal heading for the cracks and walls,

Who put all these trees here, and then soil, bulbs sending up their hard, automatic mixers,

so I can’t wait for moonlight on bodega red awning?

Ageless Quality of Fly

For instance, Marie de France, gobstopper, was wimpled. On the sunnier side of negative space, you are ageless fly in person, grooming and delightful manner, too.

Bus Éireann through Gort

I am getting to be something of an Irish guido, said the man with the weird beard, D.H. Lawrence.

The old beef-boy in shorts with so much skin, so many tattoos, smoking in gold chains,

he passes the Jesus with a bocce ball in hand, bone white sober deity with a reasonable beard.

I think this is the International style, from Maine to China.

The main attraction is the red head, big gold chain with a necklace plate, spandex black,

tight pink shirt, two colors of nail polish, like a sunset over the sea

in a visionary landscape by a Norwegian spastic,

frayed canvas buttoned pumps. Now how about that for signifying?

She might wonder, Am I a big gold chain with a necklace plate? I remember the posters of Big Daddy Kane in the eighties

plastered over the plywood under Manhattan scaffoldings. Here are narrow rushing rivers rarely, more and more

meandering rivers, more or less standing and free, in no hurry. The red fox in the pasture

sees the same caramel cows every day, eats magpie meat when he gets it,

for sporty detailing with white stripes like theirs, or black and brown ones.

Free Variation on “Saturday Night in the Village”

Blinds up on the clarity and social club drinkers of Mythos and black coffee and watchers of white marble soccer legs. Sometimes, the lovers look at each other and two words pop into their basic heads: L E O N S P I N K S, because his teeth. It’s Friday.

Sometimes, from a passing car, “Black Dog” or the Steve Miller Band on the way to Luau Night at the church gym, a K through 8 chicken dance Maryologists all around down the broken step past the third grade teacher in his actual neck brace.

In a room behind the pizza ovens and the white wooden walk-in cooler, the busboy feeds loaf after quartered loaf of mozzarella to the cheese grinder, bin after bin of cheese in the pure dairy air of love.

Down on the avenue, the bands are unloading their black-cased amps and instruments from their open vans in the sunlight of evening that begins the night, empty tables in the bar, trees over the alley in green twilight.

No railings on a wooden flight of steps to the back apartment on the second floor overlooking garages under catalpa tree flowers, to go up that way and then down.

All this pushes an immense longing.

The Adorable Couple

In the bar, she shouts back, I’M A MUSIC THERAPIST. Small bar, the musicians stand between the customers, and that’s from a plunger, that trumpet mute. I WORK IN PALLIATIVE CARE. The magnolias are all brown shreds because they bloomed too early. I AM A HOSPICE PHYSICIAN. What do people want to hear on your guitar? WISE MEN KNOW. ONLY FOOLS FALL IN LOVE. The door opens. Cold air. Soporific, early spring, burning, cold. I WENT TO A CHRISTIAN COLLEGE IN BUCKS COUNTY, IN PENNSYLVANIA. These two, their bedroom is a flute case. No. I PLAY FOUR SETS A DAY. GUITAR. LOVE SONGS. HYMNS. FOR PEOPLE WHO ARE DYING.

“In the middle of the night, it snowed”

In the middle of the night, it snowed. There was moisture in the air all winter that never got cold, and in the middle of the air there was a crossing guard in a florescent green coat, double wide. There was a boulder with a turnip on top of it under miles of clouds. There was a tattoo shop in the foggy glow. Seagulls in the parking lot: a whole lot of cotton wadding. If you would only remove your surgical mask, I could see that kisser.

Halloween Masks at the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life, Castlebar, County Mayo

Well I remember Halloween in Ireland. Apples and nuts. Apples and nuts. It was so weird to get health food I didn’t even mind. It’s not like I needed more Flake. Oh it took a few rounds to get okay.

The midnight moonrise over trees, huge and orange, the gloss on my rubber band goon face.

Here are masks way more ancient, faces cut in striped worn out shirts, maybe from wrinkled pillow cases, not monsters, but middle-aged men, with brush mustaches, eye glasses, eyebrows, not the Marx Brothers, but maybe fathers and uncles or the neighbors kids become.

Scary. And wonderful.

DAVID BLAIR’s first book Ascension Days was chosen by Thomas Lux for the Del Sol Poetry Prize in 2007. Since then, in addition to appearing in Salamander, his poems have also appeared in Agni, Boston Review, Fulcrum, Ploughshares, Slate, and most recently in InDigest, Her Royal Majesty, Terminus, and Gastronomica. He teaches at the New England Institute of Art in Brookline, Massachusetts. This fall, he is also teaching in the MFA Program in Writing at the University of New Hampshire.